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M&M's Pack Tighter Than Gumballs
icantblvitsnotbutter writes "In a rather humorous article, the New York Times reports that M&M's pack more tightly than gumballs (registration, blah blah... alternate source here). The upshot of this is what it means for manufacturing denser glass (here, the generic term for solids made of random arrangements of molecules). Some basic solid geometry and tongue-in-cheek quotes fill out the story, but the immediate applications are mind-boggling for the next time you grab munchies on a road trip."
For those too lazy/rushed to RTFA, the key point of this research is this:
Given a load of spheres, shaking them about won't get them packed as tight as if you stacked them all up neatly by hand. But take a load of squashed spheres (e.g. M&Ms) and shake them about randomly, and they take up much less room, because they naturally find a good formation. Even better if they're asymetrical in another dimension too (e.g. nutty M&Ms).
Yeah, great. But I suppose it's important to someone to know what shape will find its way into tight formations best.
No, in fact. Keep in mind that they are (presumably) using a set quantity of oranges, or m&m's, or whatever. So if the same amount of oranges takes up less space (ie, 64 vs. 74) in a random arrangement, the random arrangement is more densely packed. I thought that was pretty clear, personally.